Tale of two cities: Milan and Rome

I visited both Milan and Rome late last fall. I spent a few days in Milan in mid-November and a few days in Rome in mid-December. I’d been to both cities several times over the years but not since 2012. On my recent trips, I made a point of looking at the ways in which the cities have attempted to join other cities in Western Europe in pushing back a little against the hegemony of the automobile.

First, some background: Milan and Rome are, speaking roughly, cities of approximately the same order of magnitude, but, as is true everywhere, the numbers depend on where one puts the boundaries. The commune (political city) of Rome, with approximately 2.75 million people on January 1, 2024, is roughly twice as populous as the commune of Milan, which had only approximately 1.37 million.¹ But the metropolitan areas are much closer in size. The città metropolitana of Rome had 4.22 million people, and the città metropolitana of Milan had 3.21 million in 2023.² Most outside sources, however, put Milan ahead. Demographia, focusing on continuous built-up areas (again in 2023), says that the Milan metropolitan area’s population is 5.47 million, while the Rome metropolitan area has only 3.24 million. Eurostat also ranks Milan first, with 4.93 million to Rome’s 4.29 million in 2022.³

Both Milan and Rome are large, complicated urban areas with a huge range of functions. Both have medieval cores (centri storici) of narrow, irregular streets that have been protected assiduously in the years since World War II. The centri storici of both cities are (roughly speaking) surrounded by 19th- and early 20th-century zones of substantial residential and commercial buildings along mostly wider streets. Many of these districts have become pleasantly gentrified, while others have remained less prosperous. Both cities also have diverse and almost always much lower-density suburbs stretching far from their centers.

But Milan and Rome are in some ways quite different from each other. These differences are rooted in their histories. A simple-minded summary would suggest that, while Milan was sometimes a significant place in Roman times, it has chiefly functioned as a center of commerce and industry since the Middle Ages. Rome, in contrast, while often having an important economic role, has also been a political and/or religious center for something like 2500 years.

The two cities’ different foci and histories have had major consequences for their contemporary morphology.

In the second half of the 20th century, Milan found itself with huge areas in its central city that were felt to be devoted to economically obsolete land uses, chiefly industry but in one case a too-small fairground. Redevelopment seemed called for, and Milan allowed large corporations to use some of these areas—notably Porta Nuova and CityLife—for corporate skyscrapers, shopping centers, and apartment buildings, often separated by parkland. These new districts are busy, apparently successful places. They are easily accessible both by public transport and by walking from neighboring districts, but there’s also plenty of parking. With their tower-in-a-park designs, both reflect 20th-century ideas about urbanism. They are quite different in character from the surrounding, densely built-up pre-World-War-II neighborhoods.⁴

There is nothing comparable in central Rome. Rome has never had a major industrial function, but it does have its own version of obsolete central-city land use. It entered the 20th century with substantial areas of ruins dating from classical Rome. In some earlier periods, these had been used for quarries, but, in the era of mass tourism, protection and restoration were clearly the way to go. In so far as Rome has had a need for large new office buildings at all, it’s mostly put them in EUR, approximately nine kilometers south of the Centro Storico, an area that (a little embarrassingly) was planned in the fascist period.

Another difference: Milan, with its role as a center of commerce and finance (and perhaps, if there’s any truth to the stereotype, with a more Northern European culture) is richer than Rome. Its GDP per capita in 2021 was 59,901 euros, Rome’s was only 38,697 euros.⁵  Milan is thus as well-off as most northern European cities; Rome isn’t. This difference has had a major effect on what each city’s government has been able to do.

Both cities have a lot of cars, many more in proportion to their population than in most large northern European cities. Milan had 504 cars per thousand inhabitants in 2021, Rome 626.⁶ These figures would not seem high in the United States, but they’re higher than in most of Western Europe’s other large cities. Roughly comparable figures for Berlin, London, and Vienna are 331, 350, and 366.⁷ 

Buildings in central Milan and Rome mostly predate World War II, and they generally do not come with parking. There are some underground garages, but most locally-owned cars are parked on the streets. It’s a little startling to see how much space is given over to parking in surface areas of central Milan and Rome. Both cities (but especially Rome) have many (usually 19th-century) wide streets that include a median strip that was once used for tram lines or park space that has been converted to parking lots. These days, it’s rare in northern Europe to find analogous spaces used for parking.

In addition, Rome often has parallel parking even on streets of medium width. Of course, this precludes the construction of protected bicycle lanes along these streets.

In the older parts of Rome especially, there is absolutely no “daylighting” of corners. Parked cars block most crosswalks, apparently more or less legally. There are certain parts of Rome’s Centro Storico where, thanks to the narrow streets and much narrower (or non-existent) sidewalks, it’s pretty miserable to be a pedestrian. Driving must be nerve-racking too.

Traffic jams in Milan and Rome are, unsurprisingly, pretty common. Pollution is a problem in both cities, particularly Milan, and especially in the winter.

Curiously, drivers in central Milan and Rome are as deferential to pedestrians in crosswalks as any urban drivers in the world. They can be counted on to stop. I was startled to observe that pedestrians often use crosswalks without even glancing to see whether vehicles are coming. (Pedestrians who tried this in, say, Chicago would probably not survive a month.) Despite generally good driver behavior, pedestrian deaths and injuries on urban streets are not rare in either Milan or Rome.

Even if drivers are better behaved than in many places, a general consensus has come into being over the last thirty or so years in both Milan and Rome that public policy needs to focus on reducing urban automobile use. Most of what’s been done will be familiar.

There have been, for example, some limitations on traffic in the central cities. The rules are complicated, and enforcement is said to be spotty, but the general rule is that highly-polluting vehicles are banned from central Milan and Rome during certain hours. In addition, Milan has a congestion charge. There are substantial fines for violators.

There has also been a great deal of pedestrianization. Efforts in this direction have been much more modest than comparable efforts in, say, Paris, but they’ve nonetheless changed the character of the central cities. In Milan, for example, the piazza in front of the Duomo and many nearby streets have been permanently pedestrianized.

There are also several cases where only a lane of traffic has been left in place, for example along parts of the Corso Garibaldi, a generally high-end shopping street.

There has also been a great deal of pedestrianization in the Navigli district, where surviving canals have been turned into tourist attractions. And there are instances of small-scale pedestrianization throughout the older parts of the city.

In Rome, the northern half or so of the Via del Corso, a major shopping street, was pedestrianized many years ago, and numerous nearby streets as well as the Piazza del Popolo at the Corso’s northern end have been similarly forbidden to most motor-vehicle traffic (although exceptions are made for deliveries and taxi drivers going to hotels).

Pedestrian paths have also been created in the areas in Rome where ruins from classical Rome have been stabilized and made more or less open for visitors, although some of these paths are a little uncomfortable to follow these days owing to construction work on a Metro Line C extension and preparations for Jubilee visitors.

There are plans to create a seven-kilometer pedestrian path that will take visitors to a number of archaeological sites, but this path does not yet exist.⁸

As in Milan, there are also instances of pedestrianization scattered widely in the city’s older sections.

Because definitions of pedestrianization are not consistent and the rules for individual pedestrian areas change frequently, it’s difficult to describe pedestrianization with precise maps and figures. The following maps are based in part on data from OpenStreetMap and give an approximate idea of the areas in Milan and Rome that have been pedestrianized.

Steps have also been taken, especially in Milan, to encourage bicycle use. Both cities have set up bike-share systems and constructed some protected bicycle lanes. Milan has plans to build an enormous spider grid of protected bikeways, although it doesn’t seem as though a huge amount of progress has been made here.⁹

Rome, with its hills and its insistence that parallel parking is an appropriate use for wide streets, has many fewer cyclists than Milan and has only scattered protected bicycle lanes that most definitely do not make up what anyone would call a network. It has established a bike path (open to pedestrians) along the Tiber, but the Tiber passes through central Rome in a trench several meters below street level, and the path is evidently not considered completely safe. When I was trying to photograph it, I had to wait a long time for a human (a lone runner) to come along.

There have also been major improvements in rail transportation. Milan and Rome both came late to the establishment of Metro systems. Several other large Western European cities had opened their first metro lines by the 1920s. But in Rome the first line (although started in the 1930s) didn’t open until 1955, and Milan had to wait until 1964 for its initial line to begin service. Both cities have continued adding track in succeeding decades. Milan now has five lines. The two newest lines are driverless and take full advantage of driverless technology: trains and stations are short and service is much more frequent than on the older lines.

Rome has been slower to add lines, arguing (not unreasonably) that digging in Rome, which inevitably encounters archaeological artifacts, is extremely expensive since it must be carried out with extreme care. It now has what could be called two and a half lines (one is still under construction). Milan’s lines are nearly twice as long as Rome’s and (not surprisingly) carry more than twice as many passengers.¹⁰

Both cities also have reorganized their suburban rail lines to make them more useful. Milan has moved much further than Rome in this direction, building a through tunnel (the Passante) for several lines that offers frequent RER/S-Bahn-type service for a regular transit fare in the central city. The lines that don’t go through the Passante mostly end up in Garibaldi station, where transfers between lines and to and from the Metro are possible. Rome’s suburban lines are more traditional. There is only one through line (the FL1). It offers fifteen-minute headways on much of its route. Other lines still end up in the two main rail terminals, Termini or Tiburtina, and provide somewhat less frequent service. 

Both cities still have legacy tram lines. Milan has kept a substantial part of its old tram system intact and even uses a great deal of 1930s rolling stock. Rome runs more modern vehicles, but it’s preserved a much smaller proportion of its old system. Still, there are a couple of lines that cross the 19th-century city, most with branches in the outer city. Most lines in both cities run in dedicated street medians and have middle-of-the-street stations. But the lines are just about all pretty slow. Stops come along frequently, and trains spend a lot of time stopped at red lights.

Italy has something of reputation for being a little backward in comparison with other countries in Western Europe, and I wouldn’t say that its attempts to reduce the role of the automobile in Milanese and Roman transportation do anything to contradict its reputation. But, by American standards, both Milan and (to a lesser extent) Rome have still done a great deal to update their rail transportation and to improve life for pedestrians and (in Milan anyway) cyclists in their central cities.